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I had a month to paint these vintage Disney images out on a beautiful lanai in Windermere, Florida. My “studio” was as stones’ throw away from Disney World. We could see the fireworks from the castle every night. It’s been a great month.

I am in Florida at the moment, working on a commission for some dear friends. We are right outside of the Magic Kingdom so the theme of course is Disney. I love the vintage Disney look from the 50’s and 60’s. Here is a quick time lapse of one days’ work.

A fellow artist once commented to me that this was the scariest part of the process: starting with a blank canvas in front of you. I don’t find that to be true for me. There is something about starting over that feels rejuvenating. I actually love those first strokes of paint: the possibilities are endless, mistakes made on the last painting can be corrected, hope for a better voice this time pushes me to gesso up another one. It helps me to think of my work as a continuum. Each painting is a part of the creative process in which each piece will tell me something about myself and my own particular aesthetic. I pull the best aspects from previous pieces, steal from myself and apply them to the next canvas. I love this process because it’s not about the finished piece. There comes a point where you can’t do any more to a painting. It tells you when to move on. I love that.

I love to draw. Sometimes I get into the painting zone, simply because painting takes longer, is more demanding of my time and I wake up thinking, “I’ve got to get to that painting…” But drawing is still the foundation. One of my mentors told me that good paintings come from good drawings. It’s hard to “fix it in the mix” if you don’t have the armbiture of a good drawing underneath. It was great to return to some drawing exercises yesterday, if for nothing else to have the immediate joy of the quick draw. Self-Portrait in conte on paper. And a sketch of the next painting, crayon on paper (you’ll have to wait to see it in color). ~S

I have about 8 paintings sitting in front of me. None of them are done. A couple of them have lingered for more than a year as I have either put them off because of technical challenges or I have just gotten excited about the next painting. I have to finish these. In the spirit of everything being an experiment, I keep banging away at each new work, pushing the boundaries of what I hope to accomplish, abandon and revisit, paint over it or just let it sit on the rack. This is all process which is fun but doesn’t lead to many completed works or in other words, sales.

I was just blessed with a number of sales (mostly of older works) as I attempted to clear space in my little studio. That was a good week. The problem, of course, is that it takes two seconds to sell a painting and it takes infinitely longer to paint one. So now I’m back at it, with the renewed enthusiasm that someone out there likes what I’m doing and that I should keep going. Success, as they say, builds on success. Here are a couple of paintings on the easel now.